This Hallowed Ground (35 page)

Fredericksburg was deceptive. The Rappahannock, coming down the distant Blue Ridge on a general easterly course, turns south just above the town, and for a time it flows very nearly on a north-to-south line, with Fredericksburg lying on the west bank. An army crossing the stream and entering Fredericksburg finds a shallow open plain west of the town, extending for several miles downstream; and just beyond the plain, perhaps three quarters of a mile from the river, there is a long chain of wooded hills running roughly parallel to the river. To get out of the town and make any progress whatever, the army must start by passing that chain of hills.

It looks innocent enough because the hills are not very high, and toward the south they trail off into gentle rolling country where the railroad to Richmond curves past them. But the hills are just high enough to make an ideal defensive position, and in December of 1862 all of Lee’s army was securely posted along the crest, with guns ranked so that they could comb all of the plain, lines of infantry at the foot of the hills and other lines higher up. Facing the town itself, as it happened, a sunken road ran along the foot of the hills, with a stone wall nearest the town, the road packed full of Confederate infantry, with many guns just above. In all the war no army moved up against a tougher position than Burnside’s army encountered at Fredericksburg. Without a miracle, the Confederate position here could not be taken by storm.

The Army of the Potomac having crossed the river — having committed itself to an advance at this spot — there was nothing whatever for it to do but try the impossible, and this Burnside ordered it to do. He put half of his army in the town itself and ranged the other half near the river on the open plain to the south, and on the morning of December 13 he called for a two-pronged attack. One column would issue from the town, swarm over the stone wall and the sunken road, and reach the heights there; the other would go out a mile or so to the south, hitting for the place where the wooded hills sloped down to meet the plain; and the man apparently believed that Lee’s
army would be broken and driven in flight, with the two assault columns triumphantly joining hands on the far side of the ridge.

There was a fog that morning, and for several hours the plain was invisible while many divisions of Federal troops got into position, steeples and chimney tops of Fredericksburg just visible above the banked mist to the waiting Confederates on the hills. Then the sun burned away the fog, and all of a sudden the whole panorama was in the open — a breath-taking sight, one hundred thousand men fighting men ready for work, an army with banners uncoiling in the sunlight, gun barrels gleaming. Lee watched from the highest point on the ridge, and the sight took hold of him — this strong warrior who held himself under such iron control — so that he burst out with something like a cry of exultation: It is well (he said) that we know how terrible war really is, else we would grow too fond of it.… Then the moment of high drama passed (unforgettable moment, hanging suspended in the memories of that war forever after) and the fighting began.

The fighting was sheer murder. Coming out from the town, Burnside’s men crashed into the stone wall and were broken. Division after division moved up to the attack, marching out of the plain in faultless alignment, to be cut and broken and driven back by a storm of fire; for hour after hour they attacked, until all the plain was stained with the blue bodies that had been thrown on it, and not one armed Yankee ever reached even the foot of the hill. The plain was filled with smoke, shot through with unceasing flashes of fire, and the wild rolling crash of battle went on and on through all the afternoon and there seemed to be no end to it. Burnside was east of the river, encased in the ignorance that besets headquarters, sending over orders to carry on with the attack. His men obeyed every order, until whole divisions had been cut to pieces and the town and the sheltered banks by the river were clogged with men who had been knocked loose from their commands, but from first to last it was completely hopeless. Never, at any time, was there the remotest chance that this attack could succeed.

Downstream things were a little better, although not enough better to help very much. A column led by that grizzled, bad-tempered soldier named George Gordon Meade — a hawk-nosed Pennsylvanian, this man, with goggle eyes and a straggly gray beard and a great simple fidelity to his duty — got into a wooded swamp where the Confederate line was low and punched a small hole in the defenses. Stonewall Jackson was there, and just for a moment it seemed that he might be in trouble; but he brought up reinforcements in a vicious countercharge, the Federal support troops that might have helped Meade’s boys did not appear, and after a while the Federals came staggering
back out of the swamp and the underbrush and the hole in the Rebel line was plugged up for good. By sunset the attack was a hopeless failure at both ends of the line; the Union army had lost twelve thousand men, and the Confederates waited confidently to see if the Yankees cared to have another try at it next day.
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The Yankees did not care to. Burnside, to be sure, remained stubborn; he even had some wild idea of going into Fredericksburg, rallying the shattered formations, and personally leading a forlorn-hope attack on the deadly stone wall, but he was talked out of it by his subordinates. For a night and a day his beaten army clung to the ground, looking dumbly up at the armed heights; then, on a night of wind and sleeting rain, the army gave up, pulled its ponderous length back across the bridges, and the attack was given up for good. The great battle of Fredericksburg was over. In front of the stone wall lay hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies gleaming nakedly in the cold December light; during the hours of darkness needy Confederates had come out from their lines to take the warm uniforms which these Yankees would never need.

The Yankees who had not been shot and who went into dispirited camp on the far side of the river had uniforms enough but needed other things; chiefly hope, good management, reason to believe that their terrible fighting was taking place to some good purpose. The high command was quarreling with itself, Burnside and his subordinates bitterly at odds over the way the wasted battle had gone. The administration, already depressed enough by an unhappy congressional election and still carrying the commitment to make the Emancipation Proclamation good by the first of the new year, was aware that Burnside would not do for this army, and it was not aware just who could properly be put in his place. Handsome Joe Hooker, hard-drinking and hard-fighting, looked like the ablest soldier among Burnside’s lieutenants, but he was talking too much just now. He would say presently that what the country needed was a dictator; in saying it, he may well have had himself in mind, and word of what he had said would get back to Lincoln. If the President’s anxious gaze turned away from Virginia that December and fixed itself on Tennessee it is not to be wondered at.

In Tennessee, Rosecrans at last had his army on the move. December was getting on and the roads were not good, but the army was in tolerable spirits; it was facing south again, the long frantic race back to the Ohio River was forgotten, and this new general — “Old Rosy” to all ranks — seemed to be a promising sort. He showed himself about the camps, his huge red nose a beacon as he poked his face into mess shacks or inspected waiting lines of infantry. At reviews he liked to rein in his horse and give his men soldierly advice: “Boys, when you
drill, drill like thunder.… It’s not the number of bullets you shoot but the accuracy of aim that kills men in battle.… Never turn your backs to the foe; cowards are sure to get shot.… When you meet the enemy, fire low.”

He liked to stroll through regimental camps in the evenings, and if he saw a light burning in a tent after “taps” he was likely to whack the canvas with the flat of his sword. At such times the men in the tent were fond of shouting profane abuse, and when the general’s crimson face came through the tent flaps they would offer profuse apologies, swearing that they had thought him a rowdy wagon driver who was in the habit of annoying them, and insisting that they really had not heard the lights-out call.

Old Rosy was able to take this sort of thing in good part. His officers found him convivial and approachable, fond of bantering with his staff members. He seemed to have studied his profession attentively, and in conversation around the mess table he could display a vast theoretical knowledge of war. When he discussed some immediate problem he was apt to cite parallel cases out of the textbooks. It was noted that in battle he became restless, was likely to talk so fast that he could hardly be understood, and all in all generated a high pitch of excitement. But he was a friendly man and he worked hard at his job, and after the aloof, enigmatical Buell he seems to have been a relief.
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Washington had been reminding him that what it wanted most of all was a Federal army moving into east Tennessee, but Rosecrans was beginning to see Buell’s point of view — that such a move was easier to plan in Washington than to execute on the spot. He concentrated at Nashville, perceived that Bragg and the Confederates were concentrated at Murfreesboro, less than thirty miles away, and on the day after Christmas, 1862 — a gloomy day, low clouds everywhere, a chilling mist in the air, with intermittent rain coming down to soak men’s clothing and spoil the roads — Rosecrans called his army out of its tents and set off southeast to find Bragg and fight him.

He was starting out with some forty-three thousand men. There were more than that in his command, but he was in enemy country infested by a great many highly active Confederate raiders, and he had to leave extensive details behind to guard bridges, supply lines, and wagon trains. Unfortunately most of the men taken for these details came from the troops of Rosecrans’s best corps commander, George Thomas, who would be short one entire division when the army went into action. Thomas, who had turned down the chance to replace Buell before Perryville, seems to have felt hurt when the government finally gave Buell’s job to Rosecrans, and Halleck was
soothing him with kind words by letter — soothing him, as it finally would prove, not too effectively.
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Corps commanders with Thomas were Thomas L. Crittenden, son of the distinguished Kentuckian who had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to work out a compromise between North and South in the final months before Sumter, and Alexander McD. McCook, a cheerful, bluff regular whose men had done most of the fighting at Perryville and who possessed a division commander who was just beginning to attract notice as a furious driving fighting man — a brand-new brigadier, recently a colonel of cavalry, by name of Philip Sheridan. Rosecrans spread his three corps out over the wet roads, and after marches made slow by sporadic skirmishing and cavalry fighting his troops pulled up in front of Murfreesboro on the evening of December 29.

On the following day, noticing that Bragg had all of his army drawn up in front of the town ready to fight, Rosecrans spread his own troops out into line — McCook off to the right, Thomas in the center, and Crittenden massed on the left, on the edge of icy Stone’s River, which came wandering down to curve west between Bragg’s army and Murfreesboro. As night came down, both Bragg and Rosecrans were determined to fight as soon as there was daylight.

By the oddest chance, each general had formed precisely the same battle plan — to hold with his right and attack with his left. Rosecrans would send Crittenden’s corps over the river to come in on Bragg’s right flank, breaking it and driving it out of action, while the rest of the army held on and waited for the breaks; Bragg, in his turn, proposed to mass troops on his left and crush the Federal right, trusting to elements on high ground behind the river to keep his right safe. Conceivably, the two armies might swing around each other like the halves of a revolving door. Even more conceivably, the army that struck first might very well win the battle.

The night was cold and the ground was wet, and campfires were alight. It occurred to Rosecrans to deceive his opponent and make him think the Federal right was longer and stronger than was actually the case, so campfires were lighted where no men camped, for two miles beyond McCook’s right. The strategy apparently backfired; Bragg saw and believed but simply ordered his own assaulting columns to sweep more widely to the west, which meant that when they struck they would extend far beyond McCook’s flank.
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Dawn came in cold and sullen. Awakening Federals felt that they had picked a gloomy place for a battle. Everything was wet, with soggy clumps of black cedars massed in ominous-looking bits of forest, deserted cotton fields all about with cotton wool still visible in the open bolls. They did not have long to reflect on this, because Bragg’s men,
struck with overpowering might at the moment of dawn, completely canceling all of Rosecrans’s plans and compelling him to throw his entire army on the defensive.

The men at the right end of McCook’s line got it first, and it came with very little warning. They had been turned to at the moment of daylight, and while they were still blinking the sleep out of their eyes they made out an appalling mass of Confederates coming at them from the south — four solid columns, a brigade to a column, with immense reserves taking shape in the gray half-light beyond. The Confederates came quietly, slipping out of cedar thickets without noise, swinging into battle line and charging on the dead run, raising the Rebel yell only when they actually reached the Union line. In five minutes from the moment the Federals first saw their foes one of the most desperate battles of the war was in full blast.

McCook’s line was hopelessly swamped, hit from the flank and in front by seemingly limitless numbers, and it dissolved almost immediately. An Illinois soldier remembered, as characteristic of the scene, watching a Federal battery which had been firing canister and which started to limber up to withdraw to better ground; the Rebels, he said, swept it with one inconceivable volley which killed seventy-five horses and left the men unable to move a single gun — whereat the surviving artillerists abandoned their guns and fled for the rear. Men in reserve a mile behind McCook’s line hardly heard the crash of battle when fugitives from the front came scampering through their camps, spreading panic in their flight. An Indiana regiment remembered with grim amusement a captain who had been so afflicted with rheumatism that he could walk only with great difficulty, with the help of a cane. Caught up in the rout, he dropped the cane and went to the rear at a breakneck run, so that his men (whom he rapidly outdistanced) guffawed and pointed and cried: “My God, Look at the captain!”
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